LWDW 236: Digital Stablets

Debian turns 27! KDENLive adds support for multiple audio streams, Paragon shares their NTFS driver, podcatching from the terminal, and Pi powered cassettes.


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Timestamps:
04:00 AJazz RGB drivers
07:40 27 years of Debian
11:25 Libretro hacked
14:30 Mozilla renews Google deal
20:15 Kdenlive 20.08
25:55 Shellcaster
28:55 DIGImend
31:30 Paragon NTFS
36:05 Cassette Pi


Cheap Keyboard RGBs

  • I have 3 different Ajazz AK33 keyboards, including the Rainbow RGB, Fire and Ice Blue editions.
  • I bought them back in 2017, and even got Strider of Lutris one as a gift :-)
  • It is nice to see that Linux RGB software for them now exists.
  • I had bought them to use in Linux because you didn’t need software to configure them.
  • Since I got this clicky chinesium keyboard I decided to look for the software to set the per key lighting.
  • That said, it hasn’t been updated in over 2 years.
  • Maybe it’s because it works, maybe it’s because the dev person doesn’t have one/care anymore.

 

Debian turns 27!

  • My favorite Linux OS, Debian, is 27 years old!
  • You can contribute by code, suggesting wallpaper artwork, and by helping write documentation.
  • Or by participating in the upcoming DebConf, August 23rd to 29th!
  • I’m surrounded by five machines running Debian 10.5 and some custom kernels. 
  • They get the job done. 

 

LibHacked (RTheren)

  • Libretro got spear-phished.
  • This is a really crappy situation. 
  • The moment a person or group of people successfully pretend to be a trusted contributor, there’s not much you can do. 
  • Please support LibRetro on Patreon, so they have the money to make backups and do data migration.

 

Google Lifeline

  • Kinda hard to refuse that kinda money, when you’re in Firefox’s position.
  • After Mozilla layed off 250 people, or a quarter of its workforce last week, this is great news!
  • Google is expected to extend their search deal with Mozilla for another 3 years.
  • This should be happening in November, when Mozilla is scheduled to reveal it’s 2019 financials.
  • For an estimated $400-$450.
  • Google search is one of Mozilla’s main sources of income and this will help keep them and Firefox afloat.
  • It boils down to this, Google keeps the Mozilla Corporation alive because it doesn’t want Chrome to be seen as a monopoly.
  • I’m a fan of Firefox but the Mozilla Corporation, not so much.
  • Most of that non-fandom comes down to spending.
  • Do they really need offices in London, Paris, Toronto, Mountain View, San Fran and Portland in a COVID world?
  • That might be a stupid question asked out of ignorance but it’s one I have.
  • Then we have projects like Firefox OS, and more recently, Mozilla VPN.
  • The VPN market is saturated and other companies do it better.
  • I would like to see Firefox split from the Mozilla Foundation like Thunderbird.
  • I want that team focused on desktop and mobile browsing + associated technologies.
  • If nothing else, make the core product priority #1 again. 

 

KDENLive 20.08

  • Big note: Projects created with 20.08 forward are not backwards compatible.
  • Couple of new interface layouts. 
  • Support for multiple audio streams in the workflow. 
  • Better zoom for keyframes and the clip monitor. 
  • It managed to pick up the news segment recording from LGC Weekly. 
  • Even detected the 5 audio tracks and offered to add them to the timeline. 
  • Took a minute to find the audio mixer. 
  • Still want to see the ability to drag and select in the timeline, can’t live without that. 
  • Took a bit over 10 minutes to render a H264 on a 22 minute DNxHD 209 1080p video with stereo audio.
  • This is on a 12-core Thread Ripper.
  • Davinci did the same clip in H265 /w 32-bit audio in 5.
  • This is with a Nvidia 2060 no cape edition.
  • Work on GPU acceleration for MLT might start after the Qt6 upgrade.
  • Unfortunately some version of that statement has been repeated for the past five years.
  • We’re half way through 2020, how much longer does we plan on kicking that particular can down the road?
  • Acceleration via compute (OpenCL or CUDA) is no longer a feature, it’s a basic requirement. 
  • Back in April, LWDW220, we had covered some of the major features of the 20.04 release, but it has been updated now to 20.08.0 and is nice to revisit it again.
  • I like the new preview scaling feature that allows you to lower the resolution so you can watch the timeline preview of effects and edits quicker.
  • This feature is stock in Premiere, Davinci etc.

 

Terminal podcatcher 

  • A podcasting application for your terminal which doesn’t let you play podcasts.
  • Shellcaster supports importing OPML files from other podcast apps.
  • Shellcaster looks nicer and is a bit more sophisticated than the classic CLI client BashPodder that I have used in the past.

 

Digital drivers

  • The latest stable release is from 2018.
  • At least the latest commit is from Jun 22, this year.
  • I want to throw this in for anyone looking to buy a stablet.
  • DIGImend maintains a list of devices supported by the upstream Linux kernel and the digimend-kernel-drivers
  • If you would like to buy a graphics tablet that is cheaper than the name brands, check this list.
  • Also, many times the cheaper ones use the same chipsets as the name brands, but are just rebranded.

 

Paragon NTFS (RTheren)

  • Paragon has now offered its read-write NTFS driver for inclusion in the Linux kernel.
  • All 27,000 lines of it. 
  • The patch does not include all the Paragon utilities but RW, compressed files, and journal replaying is there. 
  • This is a fully functional NTFS Read-Write driver.
  • It’s going to take some doing to get it merged. 
  • I suppose the Paragon created NTFS driver is less bloated than if Microsoft finally made one for Linux ;-)

Slice of Pi

Hipster Pi 

  • Pi zero fits in a cassette
  • What a beautiful container for an IoT notification scroller!
  • I would use it with IFTTT for Twitter and Discord notifications :-)
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